by Charles Case, Ph.D.
[Essay originally published in the Spring 2003 edition of Between the Lines, a student-run newspaper at The Hudson School.]
Students hear personal success stories from teachers most of the time, so I thought I’d relate the story of my favorite failure.
Around the turn of the millennium, an idea struck me as monumental in its implications but miniscule in the amount of space it would require to convey it. A short essay, like an op-ed piece in a newspaper, would do.
The idea is a gender-neutral, singular personal pronoun for the English language. Since we became gender conscious, almost half a century ago, I, like many other people who speak or write a lot, struggle with the “he or she” and “him/her,” etc. Also in use in writing is “s/he,” although I have not seen “her/m.” But even these contrivances and contortions, in addition to being cumbersome, are inherently biased because one gender is necessarily cited ahead of the other.
Many people, teachers included, resort to bad grammar to solve the problem, using a plural form when referring to a single person, as in, “One can do it if they want.” According to Frank Hubert of Kunkletown, PA, a copy editor of textbooks, the current practice is to convert the whole singular sentence into its plural form in order to avoid the problem. This tactic doesn’t work, however, with some sentences because the essential meaning changes: “They can do it if they want” does not mean the same thing as the singular version.
For a pragmatic people such as us Americans, it is surprising that so much convenience continues to be sacrificed for want of a little word, which would cost virtually nothing to create. Purely materially, the amount of paper and ink that would be saved, in the long run, by replacing “his or hers” etc. with a single word of one or two letters would be mountainous, literally.
(Finnish and Hungarian are unusual in that they have only a gender-neutral pronoun, so one cannot say “he” or “she” in these languages.)
It was not merely a fondness for convenience that caused me to ponder this problem. I suspect there is a connection between the pronoun situation and the common image of God as male. It is here that the absence of a neutral personal pronoun has supernatural implications. It is my understanding that gender is not an attribute of God in any of the major religions. Of course, Christians believe Jesus is God, and Jesus was a man on earth, but they also believe that Jesus is one with God the “Father,” Who, again, is neither gender, or both. Thinking of God as male, then, would seem to constitute a profound heresy religiously as well as the ultimate chauvinism in our society.
Scholars most often attribute our image of God as male to the ancient Jewish Man of the Zohar and/or to the Greek god Zeus. However, a simpler explanation could be the use of the male pronoun, in the absence of a neutral one in the ancient languages of the Bible, Hebrew and Greek.
To explore the image of God in people’s minds, I polled high-school students about their beliefs. Answering anonymously, 37 of 41 said that they believed in God. (This proportion is consistent with the national average of about 90% believers.) Of the 37 who believed, 19 said that God is neither gender (or both), seven said God is male, one said female, and ten said they didn’t know. It appeared, then, that about one-half of the believers were compelled to distort their beliefs due to the pronoun, and one-fifth were in heresy (assuming they subscribed to one of the major religions). If this sample is extended to our national population, there are more than a hundred million distorters and tens of millions of heretics in this country alone.
I had not heard of any prospect for a new pronoun, so I began to think of one. The number of options is large but limited, and the options can quickly be sorted according to a few factors. For one, it should be short, of one or two letters, and many of the combinations, such as db, don’t work. Also, the word should not be confused with other words that might appear in the same context in a sentence. Here, the selection process becomes interesting.
Cutting to the quick of it, the word I favor is ot, which can be seen as a combination of the o in who and the t in it. Thus, “One can do it if ot wants,” and, “God will do what Ot wants.” (I have been advised by a (former) Methodist minister that using any word to refer to God is not inappropriate so long as the word is used in the “right spirit.” (The fact that this man left the ministry to attend clown school should not detract from his credibility.))
The cases of ot are like those of it: ot is used as subject and object, ots is the possessive, and otself is the reflexive.
It seemed that the “stars” were with this idea from the start. Soon after I began to write an essay proposing the idea, in November of 2001, I learned that the voters of New York State had just decided, in a referendum, to adopt “gender neutral language” for their State Constitution. The Governor was to appoint a committee to decide on the new wording. I had just begun to look into this Committee when a friend in Batavia, NY, which is between Buffalo and Rochester, informed me that Mr. Dick Dougherty, a columnist in the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, was soliciting suggestions for the new word.
In his November 14 column, Mr. Dougherty had reviewed two proposals from readers. One was the letter e (with em for the objective case and emself for the reflexive; no possessive was given by the reader, so Dougherty surmised it to be ems.) The other suggestion was co (with co’s and coself). Mr. Dougherty rejected both of these ideas, with some derision, and then seemed to sink into despair, first concluding that it’s perhaps best to keep using the ungrammatical plural form, and then: “Let’s forget the whole thing. When the Taliban take over the world it will all be academic anyway.”
I faxed Mr. Dougherty a two-page letter, in which I acknowledged the delicacy of his accepting a suggestion from someone in New Jersey. Also, to protect my claim to the idea, I indicated that ot was used for the first time in a formal document by Mr. Nick Hubert (son of Frank, the copy editor (and my godson)) in a paper, “Images of Identity,” submitted on or about July 25, 2001 in a course in English composition at Bergen Community College, in Paramus, NJ. (Nick said the teacher appeared nonplused.)
I never heard from Mr. Dougherty. So, after a couple of weeks, and before searching again for the Governor’s Committee, I began to query editors of newspapers, starting with The New York Times. It’s their stated policy to not send a reply when a submission is rejected, so I surmise mine was rejected, although, with that policy, one never knows for sure that ots submission was successfully received in the first place.
I then sent it to the Wall Street Journal, which does send rejections, and then to the Albany Times-Union, in the New York State capital, which might get the attention of the Governor or his Committee. The Times-Union also sends rejections.
I was surprised and then fascinated by the responses, or lack thereof, and I felt a kind of perverse desire to see how many people would reject it. I turned to literary magazines, starting with The New Yorker and Atlantic Monthly, and moved down a list of several more or less minor ones. All of these publications do, and did send rejection letters.
When I returned to look for the Governor’s Committee, in January, 2002, his office sent me a copy of the newly revised Constitution, with its new, gender-neutral language, to wit: “No person shall, because of race, color, creed or religion, be subjected to any discrimination in his or her civil rights . . .” [italics mine]!
I consoled myself with the (sincere) belief that the Governor’s Committee would definitely not have accepted a suggestion from someone in New Jersey. I briefly considered trying to start a grassroots movement, to spread the word orally, but this would require repeated and endless inquisitions and explanations, for which “the Doctor” risked being perceived as a “mental Case.”
Of course, there is irony in my relating the failure of ot in Between the Lines because it means I’ve finally succeeded in getting the idea published.
No Guru 